Driving Growth in Community with Banners & Content Gates
Recently, CheckMates introduced banners aimed at encouraging our community users to log in or register. This fairly simple idea has already proved successful, so I thought it could be helpful to others. In thinking about this, it was just one stop on a much longer journey. So first, a little history. Check Point was a Jive customer, but there wasn’t any actual formal program before the CheckMates community program started in 2017. In 2015, a different community lived on JiveX, which became CheckMates, and migrated to the Lithium/Khoros platform in 2019. We dialed in on tracking Member Registrations to demonstrate overall community growth to our execs. We recently started being interested in Member Entrances, but first, let’s look at the metrics we’ve been tracking consistently, Completed Registrations, as these metrics are related. Historically, we’ve been getting roughly 1,000 registrations a month. When this number dips below 1,000, we start looking at what we can do to encourage more registrations. Most of our content is available without logging into the community platform. But we have some content restricted to only logged-in users for various reasons, including ensuring users log into the platform. In the old JiveX platform, the only way to make content available when logged in was by putting it in a space that isn’t accessible to someone not logged in. The downside to this method is content won’t be indexed by Google—an important consideration when you consider the vast majority of our traffic comes from search engines. When we moved to the Lithium/Khoros platform in 2019, we developed a custom component to “gate” specific posts. If users have not logged in and hit a gated post, they’ll be presented with a preview of the top-level post in the thread, and the rest is hidden. Below is a visual of the preview, or you can see this in action here. When we first implemented these custom components, I hard-coded the thread IDs into the components. The downside is that it requires pushing code changes through Studio anytime I wanted to gate a post. I now use Custom Tags, which made it possible to not have to push a code change whenever we wanted to update which posts were gated. Note that our general guidelines for gating posts are as follows: Top 25-50 threads by visits (reviewed quarterly) Content related to events (always gated) This idea kept the numbers above 1000 a month for a while. Earlier this year, we started noticing the numbers dipping below 1000 a month (our low was 800, I think), so we started looking for new ways to bump that back up. So, we added a banner to remind community members to log in and encourage prospective members. Sometimes, innovation isn’t complicated. Showing a popup on a specific page when the user is not logged in is pretty easy by including the component in relevant layouts. We had been experimenting with a third-party service to display this popup. But I decided to roll up my sleeves and write my own. Learning how to keep it from not showing after the user has clicked on the X to close required me to understand how to work with cookies. 😊 One thing I failed to account for in the design was that the Khoros platform doesn’t provide a way to track these clicks (Google Analytics wasn’t showing me either), so I had to route the clicks to a URL shortener. That meant the results weren’t directly tracked for a few weeks. And the results? Member Entrances increased noticeably, from 37k/mo in July to 42k in August and 45k in September. Completed Registrations went up from about 1,100 to about 1,200, the delta corresponding to the number of clicks received to create a new account. These simple tactics can help maintain momentum for those using the Community product, as our early returns suggest they directly contributed to moving the needle for our community.9.2KViewsSign in to react to this post21CommentsVoting is Open for Khoros Kudos Awards Submissions
Our customers have shared incredible success stories this year for the Khoros Kudos Awards and we need your help determining our finalists and winners for the 11 award categories! Voting starts today and runs for two weeks in Atlas, ending on August 14th. All you have to do to vote is go to the Entries page for the awards and click on the thumbs up — giving a Kudo to all of your favorite submissions. You can vote for as many as you’d like! We’ll announce the winners on Atlas, Khoros social media, and virtually at Khoros Engage on October 14th. We'll also highlight all award submissions as part of the virtual event, Khoros Engage, with peer recognition by 500+ attendees. Thank you for helping us determine this year’s winners! The Khoros TeamViewsSign in to react to this postCommentKhoros Kudos 2020 Winners
Khoros customers are leaders and champions of progress in many different industries. Their innovative solutions, dedication to customers, and overall awesomeness make us proud to be their partners. This year, we asked them to tell us their success stories, so that we can celebrate their achievements with the Khoros Kudos Awards. We were amazed at the submissions. From Hikma Pharmaceuticals, who used Khoros Marketing to increase engagement on posts by 73%, to Intuit, who used their community to handle massive spikes in support volume during COVID-19, brands across a variety of industries impressed us with their 2020 stories. We received a total of 92 incredible submissions in 11 categories. This was a tough year in which brands had to think on their feet and continually adapt to moving goal posts. As impressed as we were with all the submissions, and as tough as the competition in each category was, we unfortunately can’t give everyone a Kudos Award. So here are the winners of the 11 categories. To each winner, and of course to each brand that submitted a nomination, congratulations on a great year — and thank you for a great year of partnership. We can’t wait to see what you do in 2021. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ All-Ways Connected — Tealium Recognizing a customer who successfully integrated Khoros to strategically align people, processes, and technology to connect with their customers in all ways. To manage company growth, Tealium onboarded Khoros and integrated their community and social media management platforms. Doing so simplified community processes for employees while enhancing communications with their customers. Tealium’s impressive results include a 55% increase in unique community visitors, 40+ badged Tealium product-certified community users, and 250+ product-certified members. Sensational work keeping up with growth while maintaining a human touch, Tealium! _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Best-in-Class: Care — Midco Recognizing a customer who has been able to utilize the Khoros Care solution most effectively to improve customer satisfaction and manage costs. Midco’s mission is to be the best communications company in the country for their customers, employees, stakeholders, and communities. With Khoros Care, they’re well on their way. Midco makes use of several Care features, including Snooze and Modern Chat, to provide an unmatched customer experience. This year they achieved a 38k year-over-year increase in digital interactions, a 49% year-over-year decrease in chat average handle time, and a 44% call deflection rate on Apple Business Chat. Way to max out the features of Khoros Care for some amazing achievements, Midco! _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Best-in-Class: Community — Airbnb Recognizing a customer who has been able to utilize the Khoros Communities solution most effectively to generate growth and accomplish their company mission. Over the past year, Airbnb has worked with the Khoros team to significantly improve their community experience. The results of their efforts speak for themselves: Airbnb’s community realized 30% year-over-year membership growth and one-third of the community’s lifetime page views occurred in just the past year. Airbnb also reports that hosts who are community members earn 2.5 times more revenue than those who aren’t. Incredible job making your Khoros-powered Community even more engaging, Airbnb! _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Best-in-Class: Marketing — AAA Recognizing a customer who has been able to utilize the Khoros Marketing solution most effectively to elevate their brand’s customer engagement capabilities and execution. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, AAA had to quickly pivot their carefully-crafted social media calendar and develop content focused on their members’ needs in a rapidly changing environment. Khoros Marketing has helped AAA connect with members in a variety of ways over the past year. AAA even made the Khoros Marketing Contact Center their hub for all publishing and approvals. AAA was truly there for their members on social media during this tough year, as evidenced by their 113% YoY increase in reach, 140% YoY increase in impressions, and 164% YoYincrease in engagement. Extraordinary work using Khoros Marketing to get your message across and put your members first, AAA! _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Better Together — TELUS Recognizing a customer who has been able to most effectively showcase success in utilizing at least two out of three solutions — Care, Community, and Marketing — as a synchronized customer engagement platform. TELUS onboarded Khoros Care and Khoros Communities to provide support, solutions, and transparency, achieving their goal of providing best-in-class self-serve digital solutions and customer support. They had some amazing accomplishments this year, including a 98% customer satisfaction rating, $4.7M+ in operational savings, and a 96% likely-to-recommend rate. Stellar job combining Khoros solutions to achieve service and content-creation excellence, TELUS! _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Bottom Line Savings Rock Star — SAS Recognizing a customer who has demonstrated the greatest return-on-investment (ROI) using Khoros solutions to save money. SAS used their Khoros community to help streamline communications with their customers, enhance their support offerings, improve response times, and strengthen their relationships with their users. With Khoros Communities, they realized a one-year savings of approximately $7M, and a 1,026% ROI. Additionally, a whopping 74% of customers found an answer to their issue within SAS’s community. Fantastic job putting Khoros Communities to work and saving big, SAS! _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Keep Calm and Carry On — United States Postal Service Recognizing a customer who has demonstrated their ability to manage and come through a crisis even stronger using Khoros solutions. COVID-19 has meant unprecedented challenges for many brands, and especially for the United States Postal Service (USPS). This, combined with a national census in an election year with mixed feelings about vote-by-mail, made for a tough year. USPS relied on Khoros to address these challenges and help them listen to customers and employees to solve issues creatively and successfully. For their efforts, the USPS saw a 150% increase in site traffic, reached 423k users with top organic posts, and ranked #1 in corporate response to the pandemic. You truly embody the spirit of Keep Calm and Carry On, USPS! _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Rookie of the Year — Intel Recognizing a customer who has started using Khoros technology within the past 12 months and has already seen increased success in customer engagement. Intel partnered with Khoros and was able to integrate their two communities into one platform, including 75 forums. Immediately after onboarding Khoros, Intel’s satisfaction scores improved 7%. Superb work supporting your customers while improving your products, Intel! _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Small but Mighty — Bank of England Recognizing a customer who has less than three team members and an annual budget lower than $250K who has used one or more solutions to improve their brand’s care, marketing, or community capabilities. Bank of England (BoE) onboarded Khoros and can now effectively oversee all company workflows, track analytics, and deliver multichannel campaigns. With Khoros, BoE’s lean social media team was able to deliver success with their #TheNew20 campaign this year. They boasted 93 campaign posts, 127k total campaign engagements, and 4.84M campaign impressions. Banner job increasing productivity while maintaining creativity, all with a lean team, BoE! _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Accelerator — Danone Recognizing a customer who has best scaled their deployment of a single or multiple Khoros solution. Danone partnered with Khoros to facilitate their vision of faster, more efficient content activation and social marketing performance that could be easily analyzed. With Khoros, Danone scaled out its deployment of Khoros Marketing globally, training 300+ active users and managing 250+ social media accounts in 25+ markets globally. Awesome job improving the way your stakeholders work, Danone! _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Top Line Growth All Star — Anaplan Recognizing a customer who has demonstrated the greatest return-on-investment (ROI) using Khoros solutions to increase revenue. Anaplan wanted to take their more than 30 user groups virtual to connect in new ways. With support from Khoros, they created Anaplan Live: four separate live events throughout the year with content produced by brand members at every level — from training teams to executives. Anaplan brought together 30+ user groups and hosted four live events on their Khoros community. With their live events, Anaplan brought in more than $2.2M. Amazing work using Khoros Communities to directly impact your business, Anaplan! _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Thank you again to every customer who submitted an entry, and congratulations to our Khoros Kudos Award finalists and winners.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAnnouncing the 2021 Khoros Kudos Awards
Does your brand use Khoros technology to deliver world-class digital customer experiences? Do our tools help you build strategies and results that others can learn from? Share your stories and successes through the second annual Khoros Kudos Awards in one of these 12 categories: Best-in-Class Care Best-in-Class Community Best-in-Class CX Insights Best-in-Class Marketing The Accelerator All-Ways Connected Better Together: Customer Engagement Bottom Line Savings Rock Star Keep Calm and Carry On Rookie of the Year Small But Mighty Top Line Growth All Star We’ll announce the winners on Atlas and Khoros social media channels. Throughout our virtual Khoros Engage conference in September, we will share all award submissions with our 1500+ attendees. We will invite winners to submit a short video describing their success that will be highlighted at the conference! Submissions are open until May 28, and more information about the Khoros Kudos Awards can be found on the contest page on Atlas. Check out our winners and finalists from last year for inspiration for your own submission! We look forward to celebrating your successes with you!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsKhoros Kudos Deadline Extended to June 4th!
Here’s some good news to start your week: the Khoros Kudos Awards deadline has been extended to Friday, June 4! This gives you an extra week to pull together your story and share your successes in the 12 award categories. Best-in-Class Care Best-in-Class Community Best-in-Class CX Insights Best-in-Class Marketing The Accelerator All-Ways Connected Better Together: Customer Engagement Bottom Line Savings Rock Star Keep Calm and Carry On Rookie of the Year Small But Mighty Top Line Growth All Star We’ll announce the winners on Atlas, Khoros social media, and at our virtual Khoros Engage on September 22-23. All award submissions will be highlighted as part of the virtual event, with peer recognition by 1,500+ attendees. More information about the Khoros Kudos Awards can be found on the contest page on Atlas. Check out our winners and finalists from 2020 for inspiration telling your story! We look forward to celebrating your successes with you!ViewsSign in to react to this postComments2022 Khoros Kudos Awards Winners and Runner-Ups
The Khoros Kudos Awards is Khoros' annual customer awards program, in which we collect and reward customers on the incredible success stories they have with Khoros We received 77 submissions across 11 categories this year, and the following were determined by our Atlas Community and our expert judging panel as the Winners and Runner-Ups: Holistic Customer Engagement Platform: Viessmann (Winner),General Motors and Swisscom (Finalists) Best-in-Class: Community: Three Ireland (Winner), PowerSchool, and Spotify (Finalists) Best-in-Class: Digital: Orange Belgium (Winner), Bell Canada and Virgin Plus (Finalists) Best-in-Class: Insights: Intuit (Winner), Verizon Communications and Randstad (Finalists) Check out Randstad's episodes on the Titans of Customer Engagement Podcast Best-in-Class: Social: BMW x Accenture Song (Winner), Promega and Thermo Fisher (Finalists) Bottom Line Savings Rock Star: Flexera (Winner), Upwork and Verizon Communications (Finalists) Check out Upwork's episode on the Titans of Customer Engagement Podcast Engagement for Good: Truth Initiative (Winner), Révolutionnaire and Alteryx (Finalists) Keep Calm and Carry On: Zoom (Winner) and Vodafone Portugal (Finalist) Check out Zoom's episodes on the Titans of Customer Engagement Podcast Partners for Life: Palo Alto Networks (Winner), Target and Virgin Plus (Finalists) Rookie of the Year: F5 Networks (Winner) and Zoom (Finalist) The Innovator: General Motors (Winner) Congratulations to these customers, and thank you to everyone who submitted this year!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsHubSpot, Slack, and Community Growth
Community Growth at HubSpot HubSpot has been a Khoros Communities customer for almost five years. Their community is incredibly active and dynamic. It has evolved from being Support-focused to now focusing more on customer success and marketing by driving more customers to join and engage in their community. It is a broad effort across their employees as well, with Support, Marketing, and Product teams all working in the community regularly. Slack is also a critical tool at HubSpot- like it is for hundreds of thousands of companies around the world. Slack and other team collaboration apps like Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex Teams, and more enable faster, more efficient communication than email, and have climbed to the top of the employee productivity tech stack for many (like me). However, Slack spaces and Communities have always existed in separate silos - until now. Khoros released the Communities-Slack integration in November of 2020, and HubSpot started using the integration to connect their employee Slack space to their customer community in January. So far, the results have been exciting, but there is a lot more benefit to realize. Better Visibility of Community Activity “Khoros's Slack integration has made visibility into our HubSpot community effortless. Our support team is looking to provide an even greater depth of service through answering community questions directly and in real-time with the new integration.” Jenny Sowryda - Senior Community Manager at HubSpot Community is all about human communication and connection. Relying on a single communication channel to provide that connection is no longer viable in the diverse and rapidly changing world that we live in (I’m giving myself points for not using the u-word to describe the present times). One key to making connections and being able to communicate efficiently is to know what people and conversations need your specific attention. Whether we like it or not, notifications are necessary to stay on top of all our various tasks, but notifications HAVE to be easy to view and Do/Delegate/Delete. Putting community notifications in Slack is one big way to make it easier to review the conversations that need your attention and also get a consistent pulse on the activity in your community. Increased efficiency for community moderators “The combination of RSS feed style and notifications have made it easier to know what is happening in the community. I can immediately respond and customers and employees notice that.” Dennis Edson - Community Support Manager at HubSpot When you work in a community every day, it can sometimes become overwhelming to deal with a deluge of email notifications or comb through your notification page in the community. The Slack notification style makes it much easier to review a large volume of activity in a short amount of time and then respond and engage with posts much easier directly from Slack. The Future of Team Collaboration and Community Building The great news is that this integration is free for all Khoros Community customers. The other great news is that we are working on extending this integration to more team collaboration apps in the near future. Collaboration and community are separate things, but they cannot exist without each other. By connecting the primary internal collaboration tool with their community, brands will drive more engagement, increase efficiency, and gain benefits across support, customer success, and grow. Let us know if you have any questions and feel free to ask questions in the comments!ViewsSign in to react to this postComment2023 Khoros Kudos Winners & Finalists
The Khoros Kudos Awards is an annual customer awards program that recognizes leading B2C and B2B brands who innovate to connect, service, and establish trust with their customers through the modern digital channels people prefer, including social media, websites, brand messaging, online communities, and more. We’re excited to announce the winners and finalists for 2023! ESRI: Best-in-Class: Community Winner Finalists: Zoom, Bell Canada, and Intuit Turbotax Bell Canada: Best-in-Class: Digital Customer Service Winner Finalists: Qlik, Three Ireland, Swisscom AAA: Best-in-Class: Social Winner Finalists: NSW Department of Customer Service, Promega, Lucky Mobile Intuit Quickbooks: Holistic Customer and Digital Engagement Winner Finalists: Canon USA, SMARTY, AAA Bombardier Recreational Products: Keep Calm and Carry On Winner Finalists: NSW Department of Customer Service, Mediacom, BT Ancestry: Partners for Life Winner Finalists: AAA, Virgin Plus, STIHL Watch the full video compilation of all of these stories on Khoros.com. Thank you to everyone who submitted this year. We’re looking forward to announcing information about the 2024 awards early next year.ViewsSign in to react to this postComments[Titans] Don’t Forget the Cheerleaders! How to Win Over Internal Stakeholders
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to watch my niece’s cheerleading championship. First, these are frightening to watch when someone you love is ‘in the game’. The tosses, flips, and catches keep you at the edge of your seat with ‘91’ punched into your cell phone. Second, you realize very quickly the power of having someone on your side, shouting out your name, and proudly sporting your colors. It made me think about how cheerleaders have been critical in the success of every effort in my career. As you can imagine, when I was launching a private unified B2B customer community in late 2020, I knew I needed cheerleaders. As a community professional with over 4 years of experience (and 28 years in business), I’ve found the best way to grow your squad is by following the ABC approach. Acquaint Our organization, Datto, has approximately 2000 people. This is just big enough for there to be people who have no idea we have an online Community. My remedy: Internal PR tour A video My tour included the Sales, Success, Product Management, Business Development (Biz Dev) teams - anyone who would listen. I could give anywhere from a 2 minute to a 20 minute presentation on Community. Two minutes is clearly the biggest challenge. As Mark Twain once wrote “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” First, create the perfect version at the perfect length to present your background, your “why should I care,” and then your call to action. Next, shorten that presentation before you are forced to in a meeting. Be ready to adapt and still get the essential points conveyed to your audience. Finally, create a video to spread your message even when you can’t be present. Make multiple versions to provide each key role the answer to the question “How do I benefit from promoting the Community?” That brings me to the B in the ABC formula. Benefits Cheerleaders need to be given a reason to shout and something worth shouting. This is where benefits come into play. When building your squad, you need to clearly define the benefits to them. The reason to shout depends on your Community. For our company, it positions the employee as an individual our customers can reach out to for great resources. What you shout depends on the team to which you’re speaking: Sales - Shouting Community shows our customers we continue the conversation after the sale. Success - Shouting Community shows our customers they have a place to influence our product and connect with their peers. Product Management - Shouting Community shows our customers that they are engaged to listen to their suggested improvements. Biz Dev - Shouting Community shows we are not just about the occasional in person connection. We want them connecting and learning long after the drinks have stopped flowing. Your reasons will vary - however, you must identify them and shout them yourself before others will shout along with you. Give your cheerleaders the reason and the chant, and they will make it shake the Community rafters. Connection To be honest, the formula is ABC 2 where if my algebra serves me correctly, only C would be squared (C x C). But I digress. Continuous Connection is our final component. That means staying in touch with your cheerleaders. Meet often with your biggest cheerleaders 1 on 1 or in a small group. Slack or message to inquire how the chant is being received. Ask what content or events could make them yell louder. Ask if there are new groups that need to join the squad. The ABC method has created cheerleaders that help me brainstorm Ask the Expert events, create consistently great product release posts, and approach me when they need assistance with reaching more customers. This process is always a work in progress. We are humans dealing with busy humans to speak with other busy humans. Do you see the theme, and thus the triple challenge, in this effort? This year, we are creating a Community Planning Committee to formalize a portion of the cheerleading squad and we are adding in a technological cheerleader (Walkme). If you're ever interested in brainstorming ideas, feel free to private message me. I am always up for a brainstorm.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsOracle Cerner’s Kandice Eckhoff: The Pros and Cons of Group Hubs
When Blake asked me to write about how our community manages our groups, I was not sure what to write about. We have had groups for so long at Oracle Cerner that we assumed everyone else does too. My name is Kandice Eckhoff, and I am the Product Manager for our Khoros platform, Oracle Cerner. I have been with the company for almost 12 years in various roles and in my current position for six of those years. uCern is Oracle Cerner's collaboration platform used for client-to-client and client-to-associate collaboration on our products and services, ideation, and assists with ticket deflection by providing answers to client questions. uCern was started in 2009 on the Jive platform, and at that time, we let anyone create a group. This was not a good idea. I would NEVER recommend this for a community. We ended up with groups like "Cat Lovers," "<Insert College Name> Alumni, "New Moms," and the like. While the intention at first was good, just getting people using the community, it quickly got out of control. We eventually locked down group creation. New groups are evaluated by our team and created based on business needs. By then though most of the damage was done, and our clients were complaining about search results pulling in random information or stale content. Group owners would leave the company or change roles, and groups were no longer active or responsibly managed, so we ended up with a lot of those. In 2018 we separated associate-only collaboration to help with some of the confusion. During this time, we archived groups, spaces, projects, etc. with no created content or activity within the prior year. Subsequently, when we started planning our migration to Khoros, we again started an archiving exercise to minimize the amount of data we would bring over. We were able to purge 55% of our groups because of this effort. When we migrated, we brought over 2,254 groups. That number has since grown as we have weekly requests for new ones. The need for them varies: private collaboration for specific clients and associates, aligning groups with our products, and associates realizing the need for collaboration on certain topics or markets we are in. As you can imagine managing this number is difficult. Permissions are a nightmare, community engagement is difficult to monitor accurately, and the removal of the "old stuff" surfaced older stuff clients have found inaccurate. In turn, the cycle of constantly curating our content continues. We are repeatedly told no other Khoros client uses groups the same way we do, hence being the group hub unicorn. So how do we manage this many groups? It is not easy. We are currently looking at archiving more inactive groups and realigning our community structure based on feedback we have received. Ideally, we will end up with 1:1 product groups and a couple hundred non-specific groups that remain for topics, regions, or are role specific. For those of you that do use group hubs and now have access to manage the group role permissions at the global level…you're welcome. 🙂 That was done at our request due to the number of groups we have and the time it took to update any changes since we had to do them manually. Thankfully, we have a team that can automate processes, and we were able to minimize the time spent making manual updates while Khoros built the functionality we needed. Here is my advice to any community managers planning to implement group hubs: Have a plan - I know it seems like an easy decision, but you need a plan for who will handle creating the groups. Once they are created, who will monitor or curate the content? How do the groups fit into your community structure? Will you have groups at the global level, within categories, or a combination of the two? Plan for quarterly, semi-annual, or at the very least annual archiving of inactive groups. If you are the community manager, the responsibility to monitor the ENTIRE community should not fall on you. If someone requests a group, they need to own all the group responsibilities. That includes answering questions, finding the answer if they do not know it, posting at least weekly to keep the group active, and making sure group ownership is updated as needed. Have a group dedicated to just group owners so you can communicate with them. Take a look at the resources below to learn more about Group Hubs in Khoros Communities Group Hubs Overview and Use Cases About Group Hubs Group Hubs Onboarding Videos Group Hubs Best PracticesViewsSign in to react to this postComments
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